[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/08.html]
Some advice on ensuring a tech conference has proper network connectivity. ===== Joel on Software The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem by Joel Spolsky Thursday, October 08, 2009 Why does WiFi work so poorly at tech conferences? I assume that WiFi wasn’t really designed to handle a big ballroom with 2000 people, all trying to connect with their laptops and cell phones at the same time. Sometimes I feel like I’m lucky if it works in my apartment. So I never thought it was even possible to get it to work at a large, technically-savvy conference. At Stack Overflow DevDays, yesterday in Boston, the bandwidth seemed OK but the DHCP server ran out of addresses. [...] There are steps that can be taken. Here’s an interesting study [PDF] done by Intel about making WiFi work at large conferences. The best idea I got from that was that there should be as many hardwired network access points as possible, to get the heavy users off the air, because ethernet has way more bandwidth. [...] At the very least, though, a venue should be able to tell you how many access points they actually have (if it’s just one, you’ve got problems), whether they are managed access points or not, whether dedicated ports with higher priority can be provided for the speakers and for journalists that do not share bandwidth with the audience, how many IP addresses the DHCP server can provide, the total number of people that can be online at once, and the amount of bandwidth available to the entire site. If you can’t get good answers to these questions before the conference begins, you have to assume that they’ll be running a single, consumer router connected to a DSL line and that’s about all you get. [...] ===== -- Soh Kam Yung my Google Reader Shared links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) my Google Reader Shared SFAS links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16851815156817689753/label/sfas) _______________________________________________ LUGS Mailing list - [email protected] List FAQ: http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq Info page: http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet To unsubscribe send an empty email to: [email protected]
